Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

178 Aristotle and his school8. Insects buzz (456 a 18).9. Some people move and perform various activities in sleep, and some of thesepeople remember their dreams, though they fail to remember the ‘waking’ actsthey perform in sleep (456 a 25).10. The blood vessels have their origin in the heart (456 b 1).11. Words are spoken by people who are in a state of trance and seemingly dead(456 b 16).12. Several narcotics make the head heavy (456 b 23).13. Children sleep more than other people (457 a 4 ).14. In many epileptic patients, epileptic seizure begins in sleep (457 a 10).15. The embryo lies quiet in the womb at first (457 a 20).16. People with inconspicuous veins, dwarfish people, and people with big headsare inclined to much sleep (457 a 20).17. People with marked veins do not sleep much; nor do melancholics, who inspite of eating much remain slight (457 a 26).18. The brain is the coldest part of the body (457 b 30).19. The heart has three chambers (458 a 15ff.).Yet while some of these claims are interesting as testifying either to Aristotle’sown observational capacities or to his considerable knowledge of medicophysiologicalviews on sleeping, as a whole they can hardly be regardedas impressive for their wide range or systematicity; and in the argument,most of these empirical claims have at best only a marginal relevance to thetopic of sleep. They are mentioned only in passing, and none are presentedby Aristotle as guiding the investigation inductively to a general theory oras playing a decisive role in settling potentially controversial issues. Nordoes Aristotle explain how observations that seem to be in conflict withthe theoretical views he has expounded can nevertheless be accommodatedwithin that theory. Thus, in spite of his definition of sleep as the absence ofsensation, Aristotle on several occasions acknowledges that various thingsmay occur to us while we are in a state of sleep. This is obviously relevantfor the discussion of dreams and divination in sleep that follows afterOn Sleep and Waking; but already in On Sleep and Waking we find certainanticipations of this idea, for example in 456 a 25–9, where he acknowledgesthat people may perform waking acts while asleep on the basis of an ‘imageor sensation’ (nos. 9 and 11). And on two occasions, the wording of On Sleepand Waking seems to open the door to sensations of some kind experiencedin sleep: ‘Activity of sense perception in the strict and unqualified sense(kuriōs kai haplōs) is impossible while asleep’ (454 b 13–14), and ‘we havesaid that sleep is in some way (tropon tina) the immobilisation of senseperception’ (454 b 26). These specifications suggest that more may be atstake than just an unqualified absence of sensation. Yet how the phenomena